


when we were younger

by kenscarquin



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - High School, Childhood Friends, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26260723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenscarquin/pseuds/kenscarquin
Summary: “Do you want to be friends then?” JJ asked, not a hint of fear or apprehensiveness in her small voice.“Yeah, sure,” Emily said, not as confident as JJ but affirmative all the same. JJ smiled at Emily for the first time and Emily smiled back, her chest on fire and her face glowing.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	when we were younger

Emily Prentiss knew that she would never forget the first time she saw Jennifer Jareau. It was the summer before second grade, the Pennsylvania sun hung high in the sky and illuminated Emily’s arms in bright, buttery yellow; they were covered in thin scratches and dark bruises from a summer of being a lot less careful than she should be. She had a red bicycle helmet from the boy’s section of the home goods store jammed over her thick dark hair that hung in messy waves down to her shoulders. She was looking down at the skateboard beneath her converse clad feet, the laces tied in a messy way you could tell was done by seven year old Emily herself, and her tongue was poking out of the corner of her mouth in an expression of focused chaos that only a kid like Emily could muster. She tensed her shoulders and crouched slightly before lifting off from both of her feet, trying and failing to bring the skateboard skyward with her. She fell back down, missing the skateboard with her feet and it clattered forwards. Emily flew backwards, her butt hitting the concrete of her driveway, hard. 

“Crap,” she said, huffing in frustration as her hands went backwards to try to push herself up from the ground. 

“That’s a bad word,” a voice rang out, sweet and clear, and Emily’s gaze immediately flew upwards to identify its owner. The girl was only slightly smaller than Emily, with long blonde hair that looked even more unkempt than Emily’s, the hair tie at the girl’s nape looked to be holding on for dear life so as not to slip down the silky strands and off of the girl’s poor excuse for a ponytail. She was holding a soccer ball that had seen far better days, the hexagons of thick fabric covered in mud and fraying at their threaded edges. She was wearing a shirt that was far too big for her, with the logo of a football team on it that Emily didn’t recognize, the hem fell to just above her knees, hitting right above the girl’s ferociously skinned knee caps, the skin red and puckered, matching the twin wounds on Emily’s knees. But the girl’s eyes made Emily’s breath catch in her throat without knowing quite what that meant at the small age of seven. The girl’s eyes were the brightest blue that Emily had ever seen, light and icy like the reflection of moonlight bouncing off the snow in the winter. 

“Who are you?” Emily asked, her small voice laced with wonder. 

“I’m JJ, we just moved in down there,” the little girl pointed vaguely down the street to Emily’s left, presumably to a house that she couldn’t see from her compromised position on the driveway. 

“What are you doing over here?” Emily asked, all of a sudden embarrassed at the chance that the girl, JJ, had seen her fall off of her skateboard. She got hastily to her feet, wiping the dust from the driveway off of her shorts. 

“My Mom just told me to get out of the house,” JJ explained, releasing the soccer ball from her grasp to bounce once on the driveway and then bringing her right foot up and trapping it with far more expertise than someone of JJ’s age normally contained. “What’s your name?” 

“Emily,” Emily said, self-consciously walking over to where her skateboard had rolled away to pick it up by the board and tuck it under her arm, “what grade are you in?” 

“I’m going into second,” JJ said, not looking over at Emily but at the soccer ball she was knocking between her feet in a hypnotic rhythm. 

“Me too,” Emily said, she looked down at her hands and back up at JJ who had stopped dribbling and was looking at Emily with a wistful look in her cerulean gaze. 

“Do you want to be friends then?” JJ asked, not a hint of fear or apprehensiveness in her small voice. 

“Yeah, sure,” Emily said, not as confident as JJ but affirmative all the same. JJ smiled at Emily for the first time and Emily smiled back, her chest on fire and her face glowing. 

Emily’s elementary school years were nothing but a blur, a string of the same daily routines and people and classes to form a shiny package of a childhood that was not exceptional nor horrible, and right in the center of it all, the shining star of almost all of her memories, was JJ. The girls became inseparable after that sunny afternoon in August before their second grade year and they were seldom seen apart after that. 

The memories containing JJ always seemed brighter and more colourful when Emily looked back on them. Easier to pick out in the mess of it all, seeming to glow with a fresh sort of sparkle. 

Emily teaching JJ how to skateboard down their street, running next to JJ as she rolled down the street, tendrils of blonde escaping her bright purple helmet and tickling her sunlit cheeks. Emily meeting JJ at her driveway on her way to school and walking there together, arms swinging in unison as they marched towards the school building. Emily being forced to play goalie so JJ could practice her penalty shots. Sleepovers at the Jareau house, the two younger girls begging JJ’s older sister, Roslyn, to walk them to the ice cream shop a few blocks away in the summer, or to the skating rink in the winter. 

JJ was the fearless one between the two of them, she was louder, brighter, she was the sun and Emily was the sky, the backdrop on which JJ’s personality shone. JJ approached things with a wild confidence, where Emily was quiet, analytical. Their personalities were less a push and pull motion and more a flowing completeness. Emily never felt more complete than when she was with JJ, they were two halves of the same whole. And where other kids found new friendships through elementary school, drifting through people, JJ and Emily stayed locked to each other’s sides. It never occurred to either of them that they could possibly outgrow their connection, or that anything would ever be able to come between them. 

This seemed like an absolute truth until the summer before high school. 

Middle school had left both JJ and Emily with a few bumps and bruises. They were always quick to defend one another, be it to teachers or to other students, and it left them both in a lot more trouble than they probably would have been in alone. But they didn’t care. The extra hour they were forced to be in detention was an hour they would’ve spent together anyways. JJ had careened headfirst into boy craziness upon entrance into seventh grade, whereas Emily hadn’t, hadn’t thought about boys one second in her thirteen years of living, and it left her consoling a heartbroken JJ on more nights than one. 

Despite the mild twists and turns of seventh and eighth grade, they were only two months away from those final four years, high school, completely unexplored terrain, when it happened. Emily had been sleeping when her phone rang, she reached for the source of the sound on her bedside table and swiped across the screen without bothering to glance at the caller ID. 

“Hello,” her voice was rough with sleep and her head foggy, but everything sharpened into focus when she heard a choked sob from the other end of the line. “Jayje?” 

“Emily,” JJ gasped, her breath was ragged like she was crying so hard she could barely get the words out, “it’s Ros.” 

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Emily sat up in bed, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. 

“She’s-,” more sobs, blubbering and broken into Emily’s ear, “she’s gone.” 

“Oh JJ,” Emily’s hand clapped over her own mouth as her own cry threatened to escape, her heart splitting in two at the sound of her best friend’s world falling apart on the other end of the phone. But over the next few years, Emily replayed the sounds of that tearful voice coming through the speakers of her phone countless times, because it was the last time she heard JJ’s voice for a very long time. 

Emily’s alarm clock broke through the haze of her sleeping mind and jerked her into the present, she unearthed her arm from beneath the warmth of her covers and fumbled haphazardly for her phone on the nightstand, tapping her phone angrily to silence the annoying buzzing emanating from the small device. When she succeeded she huffed out a frustrated sigh and rolled onto her back, blinking her eyes open and letting them focus on the pale white of her ceiling. She could hear her mother bustling around the kitchen, not bothering to be quiet for Emily, probably wishing that her daughter was already awake and in the kitchen with her. The two of them didn’t get along on the best of days, but that didn’t stop her mother from reprimanding Emily for not spending enough time with her. It didn’t matter that any time they were in the same room for longer than ten minutes they were at each other’s throats. 

Emily stayed statue still in her bed until she heard the front door close with a satisfying click, only then did she drag herself out of bed and traipse towards the kitchen, the promise of coffee the sole motivator for her vertical state. 

The drive to school was quick, the high school only a few minutes away, even with traffic, and Emily pulled into a parking spot near the edge of the lot with plenty of time to spare. She checked the clock on her dash before killing the engine, settling back into the driver’s seat and knocking the last couple sips of her coffee back. She walked into the school with at least a little bit of spring in her step thanks to the caffeine, but with all the appearance of someone who would rather be anywhere else. 

It wasn’t like Emily didn’t like school, she just hated the people. _Not all the people_ she corrected herself, as a pair of dark eyes met her own, the owner of them being her best friend Derek Morgan, who was leaning against her locker giving off the appearance of a boyfriend awaiting his girlfriend’s arrival, no matter how far that was from the truth. Despite that, she couldn’t help the smile from breaking across her face when he flashed one of his own, and she gratefully sidled up next to him, pushing him aside gently so she could get into her locker. 

“Morning hot stuff,” he said, dodging the elbow she tried to shoot straight into his ribcage with a laugh. 

“Shut up,” she said, shaking her head and pulling out her Calculus textbook with a look of disdain. 

Derek had transferred to their school in tenth grade, and they had been close since then. He had managed to branch out and acquire some semblance of popularity in the almost three years he had been there, but he never left Emily’s side for their crowd. She would never tell him, but she was ridiculously grateful for his companionship. The first year of high school had not been an easy one for her, and when he had sat next to her in their tenth grade Biology class with a pick up line and an easy grin, it didn’t take her as long as it should have to let her into her life. Not all the way though, never all the way. Not since JJ. 

JJ. 

JJ who had avoided Emily the whole summer before high school. 

JJ who had stayed home for the first six months of ninth grade, not bothering to contact Emily once, not even when she showed up on her doorstep with tear stained cheeks and a box of cookies. JJ’s Mom had sent Emily away with a sad smile and a kiss on the top of her head. 

JJ who had pretended Emily didn’t exist since the night Roslyn died. 

It wasn’t necessarily her fault, Emily knew that. She had no idea how she herself would react if she lost someone that close to her. But she also knew that since that day she had felt like half of her soul was missing, and she had hoped that the years that she had to heal would be enough, but here she was in her last year of high school and still feeling just as empty.

Derek fell into step beside her on the way to class, chatting lowly about football and classes and graduation and other things that kids their age were expected to care about, that Emily knew she should care about. They filed into the classroom and settled into the table at the back corner of the room, the entire classroom empty apart from their government teacher, Mr. Rossi, who was reading a book with his ankles crossed atop his desk. Emily and Derek were early to his class every day, so he didn’t even blink at their presence. 

“Are you going on Friday?” Derek asked Emily, unlike the rest of his ramblings, she looked up to meet his expectant gaze. 

“Going where?” She asked, struggling to focus her groggy mind on her friend. 

“Will’s party, it’s right after the last spring season game. Whole grade is invited.” The words echoed in Emily’s ears, fading to a dull roar as they bounced around her skull. Will. A running back on the football team. Another transfer student like Derek, with a low, honeyed, Southern voice and kind eyes. 

JJ’s boyfriend. 

“Uh, yeah, sure I’ll be there,” Emily said, breaking eye contact with Derek so he couldn’t see the pain flashing across her irises. _I’ll think of an excuse the day of,_ she thought to herself, guilt immediately flooding her chest at the smile that broke across Derek’s features. 

The halfway point in Emily’s day seemed to take years to come to fruition, but eventually, she was walking in to the cafeteria and making her way to the back of the large room where she knew Derek would be. And sure enough, he was sitting with his muscular back to her at their usual table, across from two other kids. She slid into the seat next to him, smiling at their table mates and pulling a bag of chips out of her bag, content with listening as she usually was. 

The other two faces at the table belonged to Penelope Garcia and Spencer Reid. Penelope was another friend Derek made the first year he found his way to Pennsylvania, she was a baby faced, blonde-haired, kind hearted girl with a real talent for computers. She’d secured a scholarship to Caltech before they had even finished their third year of high school and she’d sent their school to countless cyber defence championships. Despite her claims to fame, she was rather picky of her friends, and she seemed to stick to Derek’s side like Emily did, save for a few other smart girls in their grade. 

Spencer Reid was an entirely different breed, he was two years younger than Emily, Derek and Penelope, but he really should’ve been halfway done his second university degree by now. A tall, gawky boy with a pretty face usually framed by his thick glasses, he was one of the kindest people Emily had ever met. 

“So… Will’s party,” Derek began, waggling his eyebrows at Spencer and Penelope who looked at each other cautiously. 

“There’s no way we’re invited to that Derek,” Spencer said, suddenly looking extremely focused on the sandwich in his hands. 

“The whole grade is invited pretty boy,” Derek said, clapping him on the shoulder, “Emily’s coming which means you both are too.” 

“Emily’s going?” Penelope exclaimed, her blue eyes as wide as saucers behind her plastic purple glasses. 

“Uh, yeah,” Emily said, wiping her hands on her jeans and trying to avert her eyes, “can we talk about something else?” 

“Why don’t we talk about how hot JJ looks in those jeans?” Derek said, whistling under his breath so only the people at the table could hear. Emily felt her chest tighten before she gave in, following Derek’s gaze over his shoulder to where he was looking. 

She was standing next to a table of jocks and other people deemed popular enough to share the space with them, half of whom Emily couldn’t name. Everyone at the table was attractive in the general sense of the word, but none of them could hold a candle to JJ. At least not in Emily’s biased eyes. Her hair was in a tight ponytail, a few pieces framing her face and displaying the sharp edge of her jawline and the soft lines of her neck. Emily swore she could see the blue of her eyes even from across the cafeteria, illuminated by the white of the t shirt she was wearing, that rode up above her waistline, revealing a thin strip of skin, the rest of her lower half encased in dark denim. 

She felt her fingers clench into the wood of the cafeteria table as she ripped her eyes away. She hadn’t told Derek or her other friends about her past with the blonde, hoping rather stupidly that by ignoring it, it would stop affecting her. It did mean, however, that she occasionally had to bite her tongue to keep from speaking up for her former best friend. She blinked her eyes open and leaned forward on the table, pressing her hand into Spencer’s forearm and urging him into a conversation about their upcoming Physics quiz in an attempt to change the subject. Soon Spencer, Penelope and Derek were babbling about the SATs with enough verve for Emily to sink back into her chair and fade into the background, trying to ignore the desire to look over at the “popular” table. At the girl with icy blue eyes whose gaze was currently trained on Emily. 

The day carried on as uneventful as a day in high school could be, Emily had World History with Penelope right after lunch, and following that, English, her last class of the day. It should’ve been her favourite class, it being the last period before dismissal, but it subsequently happened to be the only class she had the privilege of sharing with JJ. Their high school wasn’t small by any means, but there weren’t many students at the school who were inclined to take the advanced placement English her and JJ were in together, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when Emily had walked in on that first day and seen the blonde sitting next to one of her popular friends at the front of the room. 

Emily walked into that same classroom now, staring straight ahead and making her way deliberately to the back right of the classroom, falling into the desk at the back corner. She gave into temptation and let her eyes slide from the currently empty board at the front of the room to the back of JJ’s head, her head was turned slightly, towards her friend who she was talking to in a hushed tone, chin propped up on her hand. She laughed softly, her ponytail swishing with the movement and Emily’s stomach twisted. 

Emily’s focus drifted a few minutes into the lesson, she’d always been good at English and her grade in the class was in the high 90s. And this late in her day, she doubted anything would be able to hold her attention. The class was well over two thirds over when a few words her teacher, Ms. Strauss spoke, caused her surroundings to come into sharp focus. _Partner project._

Emily’s eyes shot to the front of the room, panic rising in her chest. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“We’ll be doing readings of various dystopian novels, and I’d like the class split into pairs and give presentations on each of these books so we can get a wide range of perspectives.” Emily’s eyes were scanning the room, already identifying a few faces she recognized vaguely as people who she wouldn’t mind working with. She swallowed thickly, trying to force the panic down. _She won’t pick our partners for us, we’re practically adults._

“I’ve already pre-selected the partners. I want you to get into them now, I’ll give you your books and you can discuss how you’re going to approach this assignment.” Ms. Strauss’ words felt like a knife in her stomach, Emily’s hands clenched into fists at her sides, she could feel sweat pooling at her back, her black t-shirt sticking to her skin uncomfortably. 

Ms. Strauss began reading pairs out as Emily focused her eyes on her feet, chanting a prayer in her head that this wouldn’t happen. That this couldn’t happen. There was no way. But, like a cell door slamming home, Ms. Strauss’ clear voice called out “JJ and Emily,” just as Emily came to the realization that her life was well and truly over. 

It almost felt like she was frozen in time, her fate delivered to her by Ms. Strauss ringing in her ears as she heard the chair at the table in front of her scrape on the ground, spinning around to face her. And suddenly she was there, sitting closer to her than she had been for over three years. Emily steeled herself before she looked up. 

She almost felt like she was in a dream, like JJ’s face only a handful of feet from her own was some sort of hallucination brought to her by the currently exhausted state of her mind. But of course, it wasn’t. JJ was in fact sitting across from Emily at the small desk, arms crossed across her chest, icy blue eyes staring at the wall next to Emily’s head. Emily bit her lip and leaned back into her own chair, mirroring JJ’s stance until Ms. Strauss sidled up to their shared desk, arms laden with paperbacks. 

“Alright girls, Brave New World for you. There’s also a list of questions I want answered in the presentation and a rubric for each of you,” she placed dual copies of the book on the desk and a bundle of paper-clipped sheets of paper on top of them before she walked away briskly to deliver another partnership their sentence. 

The silence crashed over them painfully as soon as the older woman walked away, the hushed rumblings of their surrounding classmate’s conversations only served to make it that much more uncomfortable. Emily cleared her throat and slowly sat up, her stomach turning as she resigned herself to taking the lead in this situation, something she wasn’t necessarily comfortable doing when it came to JJ.

“Have you read it?” Emily asked, internally cringing at the softness of the words. 

“No,” JJ answered, her voice flat. 

“Me neither,” Emily answered back quietly, almost like she was talking to herself. She grabbed the stack of papers and sorted them into two piles, pushing one over to JJ without looking up, and grabbed one of the copies of the novel, flipping it in her hands so she could read the back. She held her breath as JJ began to reach forward, but she was only copying Emily, and the silence stretched between them as the minutes dragged on. 

The bell ringing sent JJ up faster than Emily had ever seen anyone move, gathering the papers and her book in her arms in a flurry of movement, and she was out the door of the classroom in less than ten seconds. Emily felt like crying. She knew JJ didn’t want to be friends with her but she had no idea how much the girl hated her, this project was going to be nearly impossible to get through if this is how she was going to act towards her the entire time. Emily realized she had been stewing in her seat for far too long, as the classroom was empty save for Ms. Strauss flipping through papers on her desk. 

Emily packed up her bag and walked over to the teacher’s desk, smiling slightly when Ms. Strauss noticed her standing there. 

“Miss Prentiss, how can I help you?” She asked, taking her glasses off to look up at Emily. 

“Uhm, well, JJ and I have kind of a rough past. It’s nothing bad, really, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to work together.” Emily’s voice wavered getting the sentence out. 

“I’m afraid the partners are final Miss Prentiss,” Ms. Strauss said, “and if I’m being honest with you, I put you and Miss Jareau together because you both have higher averages than anyone else in this class. I thought you would be able to challenge each other. Please try to work it out, this is worth twenty percent of your grade.” 

Emily opened her mouth to argue, but thought better of it, fists clenching as she watched Ms. Strauss snap her glasses back into place on top of her nose and look back to her desk in lieu of a dismissal. She spun on her heel and walked out the door of the classroom, not even registering her surroundings due to the fog of profanities flying across her mind that she wanted to throw at Ms. Strauss, cursing the woman for putting her in this situation. Her angry mind must have managed to send her body into autopilot, because she found herself in front of her locker with little recollection as to how she’d managed to get there. _Who fucking cares anyways,_ she fumbled with her lock a few times before successfully opening her locker, dumping her history textbook inside and slamming the door. She marched out of the school and towards her car, climbing inside quickly and gunning it out of the parking lot. She opened her window and let her fingers play with the wind, angry tears beginning to spill out of her eyes and trickle down her cheeks as she drove home.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first jemily fic and i _was_ planning on writing the whole thing before posting it but im an impatient ass aries so here's the first chapter!!!  
> if you wanna talk to me (pls) my tumblr is [here](https://kenscarquin.tumblr.com/) or just search kenscarquin :)


End file.
